Gillian Hadfield is a Hero of Justice for looking at law from a fresh perspective
in groundbreaking writings on access-to-justice issues, including her new book,
Rules for a Flat World — along with other efforts to promote new and
more inclusive forms of law.

Gillian Hadfield has dedicated her career to the study of law, economics, and society,
with special focus on access to justice and the challenge of adapting legal systems
to globalization and technology. Her soon-to-be-published book, Rules for a Flat
World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy
(Oxford, November 2016) is an anthropological study of the evolution of law, and
the economics of how we can develop better rules of social and commercial interaction.
A must-read for law students and anyone interested in the role of law in today's
society.

Q. What motivated you to write Rules for a Flat World? Can you give a synopsis? Who
would you like to read it?

We pay a lot of attention today to the role of infrastructure and platforms, like
social media and the internet, in supporting economic and social life. But I think
the most important platform we have is the one most people, and especially those
who are not lawyers, barely notice: the platform of rules on which societies build.
To do just about anything we depend on rules about how we share resources, how we
treat one another in neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities, how governments
and corporations are allowed to behave, and so on. Without good rules, people don't
trade as much, cooperate as well, invest, or trust one another and their institutions.
Unfortunately, our rules are not keeping up with how rapidly our world is changing
as a result of globalization and technology and growth.

Even more unfortunately,
we have found ourselves in a place where only lawyers and judges are involved in
solving the problem of inadequate rules. As wonderful as many lawyers and judges
are, they are not well-equipped — and sometimes not motivated — to help
us innovate better rule systems that are better able to manage complex global life.
I don't want to be too hard on my colleagues in law, but we only have to look at
the real failure to develop less expensive, more accessible ways of helping ordinary
people resolve ordinary problems — problems with housing or child support
or debt or purchases or paying fines, for example — to see that the legal
profession is not really in a position to help us address even old problems, much
less new ones. This is a problem in wealthy countries — where ordinary people
simply can't afford to access the legal system to help manage the ordinary problems
of everyday life. It's also a problem, a BIG problem, in poor and developing countries
where there are few reliable means for resolving problems, especially if people
are trying to move away from old ways that are unproductive or unjust. I think we
need lots more people, who are not lawyers, involved and investing in developing
rule and dispute resolution systems — if we are going to change that.

So I
wrote this book first to show how important our rules platforms are and to get people
who otherwise find law boring or mysterious (or worse!) interested in helping to
solve these problems. That's why the book opens by explaining that law is just another
way of making rules, and that humans have been making rules to support growth and
development since time immemorial — sometimes we call those other rules cultural
norms.It then looks at how globalization and technology are rapidly changing what
we need law to do — that's what the "flat world" is, referring to Thomas Friedman's
bestseller, The World is Flat — and shows how our current ways of producing
what I call "legal infrastructure" are too costly and complex and not doing enough
of what we need them to do. I then lay out ways in which we could make greater use
of markets — for lawyers and rules — to stimulate the kind of creative
problem-solving we need in law. The last part of the book looks at how we could
use these techniques even in the places that need help the most — the bottom
of the pyramid, where four billion people live on less than $8 a day and in a state
that the U.N. has called "outside the rule of law." I'm hoping everyone wants to
read the book! But especially people who are interested in building stronger and
more productive communities both in our own countries and around the world.

Q. What are the biggest constraints to access to justice in America? Is progress
being made to remove them?

The biggest constraint by far is the extraordinary cost of accessing legal help
— advice about how to handle a problem like difficulties with child support
or not getting paid or housing. It should be, and could be, a lot easier to get
help. But unfortunately through bar associations and courts, lawyers — sometimes
with good but misguided intent, sometimes with just protectionist instincts —
have prevented people who are not lawyers — people with expertise in technology
or new ideas for cost-effective ways of delivering legal help — from building
better solutions. There is some progress — some companies like LegalZoom and
PeopleClaim are finding ways to chip away at the limitations, offering better and
less costly ways of writing a will or setting up a business or resolving a dispute
with a contractor. There is more conversation today than there was five years ago
both within and without the legal profession about the need for change and greater
openness to alternative providers and systems — New York and Washington State,
for example, have some limited experiments underway with non-lawyer assistants.
But without a much bigger push from the public, I think these efforts will still
continue to fall short for a long time.

Q. Your book explains that law can be both a facilitator and inhibitor of economic
growth. Has the US reached a point where it has become an inhibitor? If so, what
are the ramifications?

My starting point is that law is an essential platform for economic growth. So the
problems for economic growth arise when that platform isn't working well —
when it costs too much or is too complex to implement in a predictable way or when
it just doesn't "get" the nature of the problems economic actors are facing. Law
inhibits economic growth when it doesn't work in a reasonable way to make sure that
deals are made and kept, that the impact of business and technology on people is
managed fairly, and so on. When law isn't working well, fewer deals are made, people
don’t want to invest as much, and communities push back on new technologies. Robust
responsive legal infrastructure supports robust responsive growth. Legal infrastructure
that is too costly, complex, and out-of-touch stymies that growth.

A condensed version of this interview appeared in the The Justice 911 Report, Issue 1

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